Clothes outsell computers online.

The NY Times reports that for the first time, clothing has sold more online than computer hardware and software. Specifically, in 2006 apparel in general sold $18.3 billion vs. $17.2 billion of computers, peripherals, and software. Given that the online sales of clothing are only 8% of all clothing sales, there’s still a lot of room for growth.

Why do clothes sell well online? One would expect that without the ability to try clothes on and see them up close, people would be hesitant to buy. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Standardization: Companies like the Gap and Land’s End standardize their sizes, fabrics, and styles so that once a customer knows what they like and what fits, they can feel safe buying from a website.
2. Easy returns: Zappos.com is a great example. Shipping is free, both ways. I recently used them to buy a pair of sneakers. I ordered three pairs I like on the site. I got them shipped for free. I tried them on, kept the pair I wanted and shipped the other two back for free. No questions asked.
3. Customization: Online it’s possible to allow customers to customize their products. I’ve talked about NikeID before and to me they are one of the best examples of mass customization. A customer can customize shoes or other products and have them delivered to their door, all for roughly the same cost of buying Nike’s mass produced shoes. Land’s End has been doing the same with custom clothing for years to great success. Another company called Threadless allows users to design t-shirts and submit their designs on the site. Then, the entire Threadless user base can vote on the best design and the company prints and sells the winning designs. They have been incredibly successful by combining apparel retailing with online communities, an unlikely combination.
4. Better interface: Websites have dramatically imrpoved their interface, allowing customers more flexibility in their browsing activities and providing better tools for viewing the products. Gap.com famously shut down its website for a few weeks last year to redesign it using Ajax technologies. The result is a fluid, seamless shopping experience that is more like the one customers have offline. Land’s End uses a technology called My Virtual Model that allows users to design a virtual doll that looks a lot like them and then dress it up with clothes to see how they look before they buy them.
5. Prior experience: Customers have been buying clothes from catalogs for decades. Publishing the catalogs online instead of on paper is pretty much the same. Reasons #1-#4 above are what have attracted even people who have never bought from catalogs to buy clothing online.

Go2Web2.0: The Complete Web 2.0 Directory.

If you feel as lost as I sometimes do in the sea of tiny Web 2.0 companies that seem to provide more and more specialized services, this is the site for you. Go2Web2.0 is a fantastic directory of Web 2.0 companies with a cool interface that allows you to visually scan dozens of companies and search them by tags. It is in itself an example of Web 2.0 technology, using Ajax and tagging very effectively.

Check it out. There are some great examples of innovation and ingenuity in there. Plus a lot of sites that are truly useful.

Seeing data with your tongue.

The last issue of Wired magazine had this fascinating article about how researchers are taking advantage of the plasticity of the brain to use technology to either enhance human senses or to even create totally new ones. For example, they have the story of a person who used a “feelSpace belt” to acquire a sixth sense of direction, like the one that birds have to always know how to fly north or south.

For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.

“It was slightly strange at first,” Wächter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, “I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place.”

Another fascinating example describes how some researchers are using a device that basically hooks up a camera to a set of tiny electrodes that are attached to the tongue. Visual images are interpreted as electric current against the tongue. When people put on this device and have their vision totally blocked, they can quickly learn to “see” with their tongue. It’s pretty amazing stuff.

This is all based on the fact that our brain has the ability to shift resources around. If the visual cortex is damaged or doesn’t receive information for some reason, the brain can refocus a different part of it to start handling processing of visual information. This is why rehabilitation after a stroke or other major brain damage can restore whatever senses were compromised.

This is very promising when it comes to aiding those who are impaired in some way or even creating “enhanced” humans who can, for example, find their way around no matter where they are. But it also hold promise in a different area: enabling humans to use their senses to understand complex data sets.

Humans have a very hard time interpreting multidimensional data. Give someone a two dimensional table (rows by columns) and they can easily understand the data and make decisions on them. But add a third dimension or a fourth or fifth and it becomes very hard to represent the data in a way that humans can work with. That’s because we depend only on vision to see the data and then on our brain’s capacity to crunch multiple numbers simultaneously, which is a notoriously small capacity.

So, how about bringing in more senses? How about allowing multidimensional data to be perceived not only by sight but also by touch, taste, or even new senses, such as that of direction? Basically I’m talking about creating virtual reality environments where the environment is not a realistic replica of the real world but a representation of a multidimensional data space.

This is science fiction stuff, I know. But if a blind person can go mountain biking simply by clicking his or her tongue and using a sonar-like sense called echolocation (true story), why can’t I see, hear, touch, and taste my way through a complex data space to find solutions or make optimal decisions?

How many screens does it take to install a simple driver?

I just read David Pogue’s (of the NY Times) latest blog entry and it’s both really sad and hilarious. He describes how idiotic is the interface of a simple installation CD for a Netgear 802.11n USB adapter. Read it and weep